Good morning. You may remember, way back in the mists of time, a considerable amount of anxiety about Jeremy Corbyn purging the Labour party of internal critics. Now that story has been entirely reversed: Aletha Adu, Pippa Crerar and Jessica Elgot reported yesterday on senior party figures saying that Corbyn “will never be permitted to stand as a Labour MP at an election again”.
That news is not exactly a surprise to close observers of the machinations of the party: one ally of Corbyn’s is quoted as saying that the MP for Islington North is the only person who had not “fully realised” that he would never have the party whip restored. But it feels like the denouement of something – and it shines a light on a wider and more consequential story about how Labour is changing.
Today’s newsletter explains the Corbyn case – and how Keir Starmer is remaking his party in his own image by blunt force. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
Climate crisis | Dozens of media organisations from around the world have published a joint editorial article calling for a windfall tax on the biggest fossil fuel companies. “Humanity has to end its addiction to fossil fuels,” the joint editorial, which was coordinated by the Guardian, says. Read it here.
Local government | Two of England’s largest Tory-run local authorities have warned that they will be forced to declare bankruptcy within the next few months because of the unprecedented financial crisis enveloping both councils.
G20 summit | Joe Biden has said he does not believe China has any “imminent” plans to invade Taiwan, but objected to its “coercive and increasingly aggressive actions” toward the island in his first in-person meeting with Xi Jinping since they became leaders.
US midterms | Republicans were on the brink of taking control of the US House of Representatives after a flurry of races were called for them on Monday. But Democratic candidate for governor in Arizona, Katie Hobbs, defeated her far-right opponent Kari Lake.
Politics | Rishi Sunak said he does not recognise the claims from multiple civil servants against his deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, that he bullied staff. Another senior official who worked at the Foreign Office when Raab was in charge has suggested that the bullying allegations were accurate.
In depth: ‘The left’s being completely frozen out’
To many of those who voted for Keir Starmer in the last Labour leadership election, part of his appeal was that he was “Corbyn in a suit”: a more professional politician who would carry his predecessor’s ideals into Downing Street through sheer managerial competence.
That theory of continuity began to look shaky when Corbyn lost the party whip after he rejected the conclusions of the EHRC report on antisemitism in Labour in 2020, saying that the problem had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons”.
A month later, the suspension of Corbyn’s party membership was lifted after a “clarification” that antisemitism had not been exaggerated – but Starmer refused to restore the whip. All of that means that while Corbyn is still a Labour member, he sits as an independent MP.
If there was any lingering sense that this awkward juxtaposition could be resolved, yesterday’s Guardian story appears to kill it off decisively. “Jeremy Corbyn is never getting back in,” one senior Labour figure says – even if he apologises “unequivocally, unambiguously and without reservation”.
It’s understandable that the rejection of Corbyn as a future Labour candidate should gain a lot of attention. But it pales in significance next to a wider issue which sometimes gets less traction: trigger ballots and candidate selection battles.
These mechanisms are arcane – but they are the venue for the real battle over the future of the Labour party. “Starmer is winning easily,” one person on the left of the party told me yesterday. “The left’s being completely frozen out and there’s not a lot of concern about how ugly it is to make that happen. And frankly it’s working.”
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What are trigger ballots, and how do they work?
Trigger ballots are nothing new: they have been in place for sitting Labour MPs in some form or another since 1992. They mean that an MP can face a reselection battle if local party branches and affiliates – usually local branches of Labour-linked unions – vote for it.
They became a big story under Jeremy Corbyn, when the party’s ascendant left changed the rules to lower the trigger threshold from 50% to one-third of local branches or affiliates. Many from the right of the party feared that this would mean the removal of popular local MPs in favour of candidates more ideologically aligned with the Corbyn project. That change was reversed under Starmer, with the threshold going back up to 50%.
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What has the outcome been?
In practice, trigger ballots had a negligible impact on reshaping Labour under Corbyn: not a single Labour MP was deselected during his time as party leader. While the threshold is higher under Starmer, one MP on the left of the party, Sam Tarry, has been deselected, while others including Ian Byrne and Apsana Begum, both on the left, have a fight on their hands.
One source described the central party’s stance on these ballots as “strategic silence” when it is happy for an MP to be triggered. But they do appear to be mostly linked to specific local disputes or grievances than the bigger picture – and they are not enough to fundamentally change the parliamentary party, which is much more easily shaped by the selection of new candidates in seats Labour hopes to win at the next election.
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How are new candidates selected?
According to the Labour party rulebook, there are three stages: longlisting, shortlisting and selection by a vote of local party members. The crucial change under Starmer is at the longlisting stage, where, after new rules earlier this year, national and regional boards control which candidates are put forward to the constituency party to choose from.
Some candidates backed by trade unions get longlisted automatically – but in some cases, they have been excluded by the central party after a process of “due diligence” which a Starmer ally told LabourList was designed “to ensure that we never have candidates again who bring shame on the Labour Party.”
In a piece for the House magazine, Sienna Rodgers reported that the strategy is described as “the heir and the spare”: “exclude undesirables at the start of the process, leaving only the top choice alongside one or two contenders the leader’s office could happily live with”.
The decisions taken under Corbyn might be viewed as similarly outcome-oriented: in that era, the party’s ruling body would seek shortlists of a “favourite applicant plus a couple of candidates … deemed no-hopers”. But the new approach appears to be much more ruthlessly executed.
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How has it played out?
The veteran political journalist Michael Crick, who tracks the candidates being selected by the major parties, tweeted last week that of the 40 candidates in winnable seats selected so far, only one could be viewed as firmly on the left of the party – Faiza Shaheen in Chingford and Woodford Green – and only one held a “working-class job”.
While that might be viewed as the natural consequence of Starmer’s political brand, the really striking thing is how they appear to have been chosen, particularly in the due diligence process.
Maurice McLeod, a veteran anti-racism activist, wrote for the Guardian that he had been flagged as unsuitable for offences including liking a tweet sent by Green party MP Caroline Lucas. In Milton Keynes, trade unionist Lauren Townsend said she had been blocked because she had liked a tweet in which Nicola Sturgeon said she had tested negative for Covid.
Other examples include candidates flagged for praising an article by Owen Jones, supporting Palestinian rights, and liking a tweet sent by Jeremy Corbyn’s policy chief, Andrew Fisher. The leftwing campaign group Momentum points to counterexamples of preferred candidates whose roughly analogous social media activity appears to have been overlooked.
The Labour leadership would argue that these concerns are part of a broader picture – and it is simply taking necessary steps to exclude weak candidates and ensure unity. “Of course it’s natural that he wants a PLP that is united and not engaged in factional war,” a Labour source told the Guardian in the summer.
But aggrieved leftwingers see all of this as misleading and counterproductive. “The people being excluded aren’t just Corbynites, they’re people on the soft left,” one said yesterday. “The outcome is going to be a set of new MPs who don’t bring different ideas to the table. It’s laughable to say this is anything to do with the rules – there’s a double standard being applied. This is just raw power, and it’s extremely effective.”
What else we’ve been reading
If you have ever had the passive-aggressive and perhaps even menacing notifications from the Duolingo owl then you might relate to Morwenna Ferrier’s brilliant piece on her obsession with the language-learning app. Ferrier digs into whether or not an app designed to get you hooked is actually useful. Nimo
Researcher and software engineer Molly White provides a sharp primer on the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX – and warns: “The aftershocks of FTX’s collapse will be protracted and devastating.” Archie
In its latest attempt to curb the number of small boats crossing the Channel, the government has signed an agreement with France for new migrant patrols. Diane Taylor explains why this crackdown, like the others that came before it, is doomed to fail. Nimo
To mark the day on which the global population is projected to reach 8bn, this multiauthored feature hears from new parents of children across the planet – from China (“A large number of parents use their children to realise their own unfulfilled dreams, says expectant mother Yan Zi) to Nigeria (“You can’t have many children nowadays,” says Said Omar, a father of two. “Life is very tough now.”). Archie
The situation in Haiti has reached breaking point, as 200 armed groups control 60% of the country’s capital. Jess DiPierro Obert’s dispatch from Port-au-Prince paints a harrowing picture, where Haitian women and children are increasingly facing rape, torture and kidnapping amid spiralling gang violence. Nimo
Sport
Cristiano Ronaldo | Manchester United said that it would await “the full facts” before responding to an interview in which Ronaldo said he did not have respect for manager Erik ten Hag and felt “betrayed” by the club. In a statement, the club said it was focused on the “togetherness” being built under Ten Hag.
Tennis | Tennis star Novak Djokovic will be given a visa by the Australian government, allowing him to play the 2023 Australian Open. In January 2022 Djokovic’s visa was revoked on the grounds a recent Covid diagnosis did not justify an exemption to Australia’s requirement for visitors to be vaccinated.
Rugby League | England lost the Women’s Rugby League World Cup semi-final 20-6 to New Zealand in front of a near-capacity crowd in York.
The front pages
The Guardian leads today with “Tory councils warn Sunak on stark risk of bankruptcy”, with a supersized masthead to draw attention to a joint editorial article published with dozens of other media organisations around the world on climate change: “It’s time to act”.
The Telegraph says “Households face steep increase in council tax”. “Sunak will help poorest by boosting living wage” – that’s the Times, while the Daily Mirror promotes an exclusive with “TV legend Ricky Tomlinson” who says “Axe The triple lock and people WILL die”. The Daily Express says “Rishi gets it … ‘pensioners at forefront of my mind’”. “Nurses paying price of migrant crisis” – the Daily Mail says foreign nursing students in the UK are being moved out of hotels to make way for asylum seekers.
The i’s top story is “Starmer: raise UK taxes for Amazon and non-doms, not lower earners” whereas the Financial Times goes for a big international story today: “Taiwan tensions overshadow Biden and Xi’s push to improve relations”. “Yes oui can” – the Metro has Suella Braverman air-kissing with her French counterpart as it reports on the deal to try to stop small-boat Channel crossings. The Sun touts a “Ronaldo world exclusive: why I blanked Gary Neville”.
Today in Focus
Is the UK housing market heading for a crash?
A steady stream of bad economic news has filtered into Britain’s property market, prompting fears that prices could tumble. But how worried should people be? Rupert Jones reports
Cartoon of the day | Ben Chilton
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Thomas Dambo grew up on a commune in Denmark. His parents always encouraged artistic expression and creative problem solving and these values carried him through most of his life. Decades later, Dambo, who is now a recycle artist, has finished a multisite exhibition which is buried in Western Australia. He constructed six giant trolls from locally sourced recycled timber, secondhand furniture and branches and leaves, building them in the forests that they would be displayed in. The exhibition is a testament to Dambo’s commitment to sustainability: the trolls are not just representations of the mysticism and folklore that he grew up with but are symbolic of nature itself which he believes is being destroyed.
Alongside the help of the Bindjareb people, the regions traditional owners, Dambo has been able to create a world where people delight in nature, protect it and celebrate their imaginations.
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Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
